"That's what whales do; they give the ocean its voice, and the voice they give it is ethereal and unearthly." - Dr Roger Payne
SLQS Gallery presents A BALLAD, a solo exhibition by London-based Danish artist Amanda Seibæk. This new series of paintings, ceramics and bronze sculptures transforms oceanic and cetology research into abstract form, giving visual voice to a sonic world that is slipping into silence.
A baleen whale in the Pacific sings several octaves above its peers, inaudible to them, singing to itself. For Seibæk, it also revealed an unexpected kinship, discovered while recovering from throat surgery that had left her unable to speak. This personal affinity soon opened onto a longer history of projecting human feelings onto whales. Now, man-made ocean noise is reshaping that relationship, disrupting whale communication on a scale too vast and submerged for us to register.
Seibæk's paintings investigate how some sounds are life-sustaining, like erupting volcanoes, and others destroy ocean life. Her installation of ceramic and bronze sculptures, cast from spectrogram recordings of the lone whale's frequency, translate data into a new language that sings silently across the paintings and gallery walls.
A BALLAD is a meditation on communication, isolation and environmental loss. In the artist's words: "it is a reflection on how life continues to sing even when it is not heard, and how death itself can generate new forms of life.”
Amanda Seibæk is a Danish artist who lives and works in London. Her practice orbits around a single, generative question: how can scientific explanations become poetic images? For Seibæk, this question is itself a force, one that stretches fact into fiction and gives visual shape to emotion. She works between painting, print and sculpture, developing a language loosened from its own fixity. Through this material investigation, she seeks to translate, and to redeem, the tension between poetic and scientific language. How is a blizzard not a heartbreak and how are invasive species not equal to perseverance?
Seibæk holds a BFA from Glasgow School of Art (2019-2022) and MA Painting from the Royal College of Art (2025-2026). She is the winner of the Jon McFarland Print Prize, Glasgow (2022), a finalist for the ACSStudio Prize, Gurr Johns, London (2024) and was shortlisted for the John Byrne Award, Scotland (2022). She has undertaken selected residencies at Dumfries House with the Royal Drawing School (2024 & 2025) and SWG3, Glasgow (2022). Her work is held in the collections of SWG3 (Glasgow), The King's Foundation (Dumfries House) and the Simon Nixon Collection.
Seibæk has exhibited in the UK and internationally. Solo presentations include: NADA, Patricia Fleming Gallery solo booth, Miami (2025); Avenues, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow (2024); and Hemispheres, SWG3, Glasgow (2023). Recent group exhibitions include: Minor Attractions, Patricia Fleming Gallery, London (2025); Anemoia, Flexitron, London (2025); Arden Asbæk, Copenhagen (2025); The Persistence of Painting, Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow (2024-2025); For Satin Bowerbirds, Boardroom Committee Room, Glasgow (2024); John Byrne Award, Edinburgh (2023); Pathways to Apricots, Outlier Gallery, Glasgow (2023); Through the Turnstiles, Strike Art, London (2023); A Coalescence of Daydreams, Affordable Art Fair Graduate Show, London (2022); Unbaked Bread, Changing Room Gallery, London (2022); Cloud Seeding, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2022) and Figures in Motion, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow (2022).